


Eden

by PeniG



Series: Akashic Records [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Archangel Michael is not a good commander, Backstory, Eden - Freeform, Gen, Injury, Pre-Slash, you decide if comfort qualifies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 20:10:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20088061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: Operation Eden is a bust. Phase 2 of the Human Project is being put together. Aziraphale gets some blame, some extra time in Eden, some unexpected company, and a new job.“You will excuse me if I don’t allow a demon to decide the moral of my story.” Ugh, now he’d be offended and crawl off - somewhere. Which would be for the best. Really.





	Eden

**Author's Note:**

> Eden is a hodgepodge of floral/faunal assemblages. Deal.  
I have read one analysis that interprets both Crowley's and Aziraphale's wings as being based, not just on swans, but on swans who were pinioned as adults. And it makes as good a reason as any for having to drive a burning Bentley and miracle a scooter into flying. So here you go.

Aziraphale took the next convenient opportunity to report Crawly to his commander, Michael, of course. Oh, not the whole conversation; not even that a conversation, as such, had occurred. Possibly she was left with the impression that he had only happened to glimpse the great serpent when he slunk off to announce his triumph to Hell; but this was at least partly because, having come around with the order to seal up the Eastern Gate and then report to the center of the Garden, she was in a bit of a hurry and not inclined to hear lengthy reports. “Should’ve smitten him on the way out,” she said. “Right. Center of the garden, soon as you can.”

Being delayed by God popping in to speak with him, Aziraphale was late. Michael glared and gestured at him to fall in with the other three, already in parade rest and full ethereal forms, next to the Forbidden Tree. The lushly blooming, fruiting plants rustled with the force of their own growth, but it was nearly noon and the birds were mostly silent, drowsy with heat and no competition for the short preliminary song of praise Michael led before getting down to business, walking the line as she spoke.

“Operation Eden, as you’re all aware, is a bust, because Someone, apparently, let a demonic Serpent get at Eve. I cannot overemphasize the importance of taking responsibility for one’s mistakes. You were _all_ on apple tree duty. But it only took _one_ of you relaxing your vigilance to allow this disaster to occur.” Abruptly she turned on the Guardian of the Southern Gate, her wings in stooping posture. “Was it you, Hadraniel?”

“Sir, no sir!” Hadraniel responded; with admirable confidence, Aziraphale thought, given that, had any of the them actually _seen_ Crawly prior to the temptation, they would have stopped him. It wasn’t as if the Serpent had advertised his presence. But Michael was already stepping in front of the Guardian of the Western Gate, her posture slightly more accusing, if anything.

“Sahakiel, was it _you_ past whom the Serpent slipped?”

“Sir, no sir!”

Honestly, expecting a demon to come through a gate hadn’t been realistic. Many creatures could climb, after all. Aziraphale had seen several snakes, twining up tree trunks and onto the tops of rocks, and had spent one fascinated afternoon watching a small boa traverse the wall around the garden by means of the small edges of stone at the joins. Presuming that, in addition to changing his shape, Crawly could also change his size, he could have come in almost anywhere. Sahakiel must have reason to believe that he hadn’t missed any such tricks. However -

Michael was in front of the Guardian of the Northern Gate now, her fierceness amped up to an intensity that made Aziraphale want to take a step back; and it wasn’t even directed at him. Yet. “Zephon! Are _you_ the one past whom the demon slithered, on whose watch he whispered words of temptation into Eve’s ear?”

“Sir, no sir!”

Come to that, snakes burrowed. The earth of Eden was crumbly and moist, with a rich and pleasant scent, and wasn’t Hell situated below the Earth? A wall and gates around the periphery were well-calculated to keep _Adam and Eve_ out, once expelled, and anyone who tried to fly over would certainly have been spotted, but _was_ there, in fact,_ any_ precaution that could have prevented Crawly from popping up out of the ground right next to Eve and striking up a conversation with her as easily as he had with Aziraphale? Eve was a friendly lass, who used to come to the Eastern Gate specifically to talk to Aziraphale when Adam got involved in some project or other, Adam being a man of his hands. She’d passed fruit through to him, presented him with the very first flower crown she’d managed to twist together after several failed attempts, and asked questions about the world outside, the sky, the earth: _Why don’t angels have to eat when I and Adam and all the animals do? Where does the Sun go in the evening? Don’t you get bored looking out at all that sand?_ Poor lamb, Aziraphale hoped she was all right - but Michael stood in front of him now, it was his turn, and she looked like a star about to blow out into a supernova, like the volcanoes that had surged out of the deep on the second day to boil the sea in the process of making the land. “Aziraphale,” she said, too quietly. “You say you saw the Serpent leaving Eden. Was it _also_ on your watch that the demon breached the Garden’s sanctity in the first place?”

“I, well, I suppose it must have been,” said Aziraphale, wringing his hands. “Since it wasn’t anybody else. And it _does_ make sense, that he’d go down by the same way he came up. Unless he was following Adam and Eve around wanting to watch them leave, and they _did_ leave from my gate after I” _gave them my sword_ “after I turned them away. She was crying, poor thing. But if he’d been following them I suppose someone else would have seen him, too, and no one did? Did you? So -“

Michael cut him off with a savage gesture of wings, hands, and head. “So you accept responsibility for this fiasco?”

“I think I have to. Eve, I mean, regardless of how Crawly got in, she asked me once what a guardian was, and when I told her she asked what she needed to be guarded _from_, and I told her there were, were vicious wicked things outside that would hurt her and Adam if they could. And I told her, I told her not to worry about it! She _trusted_ me to keep them away!”

“So you accept whatever punishment I as your commanding officer mete out?”

“Yes, of course, how could I object? Oh, don’t you think, couldn’t they come back in, then? She trusted me, us, you know, I as good as _told_ her we’d never let anything in, so when she met up with a handsome snake she thought he couldn’t mean any harm, was another of God’s creations, as innocent as she was -“

“She was forbidden to eat, and she ate, and tempted the man to eat, too. Their punishment is accomplished and is no longer your concern. It is your own guilt and punishment that should occupy your mind, Aziraphale. Kneel down.”

Aziraphale obeyed, absently, his mind racing. All right, yes, Eve _had_ been told the fruit of the tree was forbidden, but -

Michael’s sword, flaming, sheared through a flight feather, high on the wing, and burned through it to the root.

Aziraphale screamed, once, blind with pain, and snapped out of his ethereal manifestation; but it didn’t help; and neither did screaming, so he caught his tongue between his teeth and tried to be silent; neither did jerking or trembling or writhing so he hugged himself and tried to be still. The other Guardians watched with wincing horror in their darting eyes, but no other reaction. _They_ were good soldiers, who had distinguished themselves in the War, whereas_ he_ had only managed to get himself wounded. He’d never really been on a par with them, had he?

Michael walked around him again, wiping her blade clean of down and ichor, sheathing it. “Do you understand your punishment?”

“I’m pinioned,” he panted, needing air as he hadn’t been aware of needing it before. “I, I can’t fly.” The Garden smelled of apple blossom, roses, honeysuckle, and burnt feathers.

“That is correct,” said Michael. “Here on earth, you are limited to earthly modes of transportation. If you are ever summoned into Heaven again, you will have to climb there. Do you understand?”

It hurt. Oh, it hurt! “I understand,” Aziraphale said.

“You will stay here until you receive further orders.” Michael turned away, done with him. “You three, my beloved Guardians, will return to the Host with me. The next phase of creation begins today, and we must be ready for new orders. Come!”

She spread her barred and banded wings and shot straight into the air, without a backward glance, and the remaining Guardians followed her. Aziraphale watched them go, until they vanished between two puffy white clouds. Only then did he allow himself to turn his head and twist his wing to examine the damage.

Michael had been thorough. Far more so than necessary. No miracle he could cast would restore any part of this. Not that he would contemplate doing so. Only - it hurt _so much!_ He tried to fold the wing away; tried mantling; tried extending it; tried to find a position that was not excruciating, and failed. But at least he didn’t have to stay here in the hot sun, getting a headache. He moved away from the Forbidden Tree, into the shade of a cherry, trying to regulate his breathing.

“Ouch, that’s nasty!” The Serpent slid out of a mass of flowers like bleeding hearts and shifted into his Crawly form, reaching for the wing with long fingers.

Aziraphale jerked away, hissing with pain, and Crawly held up empty palms. “Easy, angel, I just want a look!”

“Look all you like but don’t touch it!” Aziraphale spread the wing out, wondering if a buffet from it would do Crawly any harm. Not as much as it would do himself. “You may as well examine the fruits of your labor.”

“_My_ labor? I never touched you!”

“You never touched Eve, either, and where is _she_ tonight? Were you lurking the whole time?” He couldn’t have been. Somebody (not in senses-shattering pain) would have sensed that cool spicy desert-night aura in the golden afternoon, even through all the competing garden fragrances and lights and movements.

“I just got here. Heard an angel scream and wondered what it was about.” He looked a little sick, examining the wound from as near as Aziraphale could bear to let him come without flinching. “Is this what they did to you for giving away the sword?”

“No. No, that shoe hasn’t dropped yet. Michael did that as my penalty for letting you in.”

“But you didn’t! Not any more than the other three did. I wasn’t such a fool as to try to get past a blessed Principality with a big old flaming sword! Why bother, when I could come straight up through the ground?” He shook his head over the wing. “Neat job, anyway. Mine bled for days. One advantage of a flaming sword, cauterization. It must hurt like the dickens, though.”

“It, it does, rather, but it’s no more than I deserve. Maybe I didn’t let you past me, per se, but I, I gave her a false sense of security. I told her we’d keep the bad things out and she wasn’t _prepared_ -“

“Oh, stop it. What I said is on me and what she did is on her. I’d never have thought of the damn apple if she hadn’t been so curious about it. Sooner or later, she’d have done it on her own.” Aziraphale bristled and Crawly made a shushing motion. “But we’ll call it my fault if you like. The point is, _you_ did your job. It’s not your fault your job was a waste of time. You know what’ll help that wound? A cold pack. Hang on.”

With some difficulty - he still hadn’t gotten the hang of the whole feet and legs thing, and had to balance with his broad wings (and yes, he _was_ missing a flight feather) - Crawly made his way to the spring welling up between the rocks near the Forbidden Tree, broke off a frond of fern, and swirled it in the water. In a few moments he pulled it out with a mass of accumulated ice sheathing it, and wrapped it up in fig leaves on his way back. “Here.” He stood well back and held the cold, dripping bundle out at the end of his long arm, barely within Aziraphale’s reach. “Press that on. It’ll numb it, keep the inflammation down.”

Aziraphale recognized good advice when he got it, and did so. “Thank you. I’m sorry. I hadn’t noticed your pinion before.”

“Yeah, you’d have had to look at me to do that.”

Aziraphale flushed, but Crawly smiled at him, quite a nice smile, made it all the way to his eyes, which he’d seen little enough of since being drafted into the Host. “S’all right! Angels don’t have to be polite to demons, you know. And you were worried about Adam and Eve. I got it.”

“Who pinioned you so carelessly that you bled for days”?” Aziraphale asked. “One of your demonic masters?”

“Naw. I’d be more use to ‘em if I could still fly. Quite a few of us got pinioned during the War, you know. Captured. Some thug buzzing around Gabriel did it to a batch of us lesser fry, wholesale, not even a sword, just rip-rip-rip through the lot of us. It hurt a bit, but Falling hurt worse.” He shrugged, his gleaming black wings fracturing sunlight into an array of colors along the edges. “You get over it.”

Aziraphale could understand how this plausible fellow had cozened Eve. He reminded himself that this easy, even kindly, familiarity and apparent frankness was all a cover for evil intent, and shifted nervously. But the ice was helping already. “It wouldn’t be a punishment if it were pleasant,” he said.

“Don’t see what good it does, myself,” said Crawly, plopping carelessly to the ground in a nice sunny spot, bruising a bed of thyme and adding another fragrance to the many contending with the charred feathers. “The bell’s never getting unrung, whether you suffer or not, so why should you suffer?”

“I expect I’ll be more diligent in the future. Somebody should have thought of that ‘burrowing up through the earth’ trick.”

“If you had I’d have thought of another trick.” The demon lay back in the full sun, cushioned by wings, cupping his hands behind his head so that the elbows jutted out. “How’d she decide to blame you?”

“She asked each of us in turn, and I was the only one who’d seen you at all, and the others were all sure it wasn’t them.”

“What, so you admitted it? What do you reckon would’ve happened, if you hadn’t volunteered as scapegoat?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The easiest thing would have been to do a search through the Akashic Records. But I, I didn’t think -“

“Didn’t want anyone to see you give away the sword and take a demon under your wing?”

“No! Not exactly. I, I didn’t think of it. In time. I don’t think well under pressure.”

“So, if she hadn’t been able to intimidate one of you into confessing, she’d have had to do an investigation. A little actual work. But since you folded, she got to administer swift and strict discipline in front of the others and get on with her day. Huh. Bet those three angels won’t risk making her angry any time soon. All right, I’m beginning to see the point here. I don’t think, from her point of view, this was about _you_ at all. If it makes you feel any better.”

“It, no, it doesn’t.”

“Mm. Well, then, next time don’t go rushing to confess things you didn’t do! _That’s_ what you should learn from this punishment!”

“You will excuse me if I don’t allow a demon to decide the moral of my story.” Ugh, now he’d be offended and crawl off - somewhere. Which would be for the best. Really.

Crawly laughed. “All right, point to you.” He brought one knee up and crossed the other over it. “Who’s watching the Eastern Gate if you’re in here recuperating, anyway?”

“I really shouldn’t share information with you. But I don’t suppose you should really be fetching me ice packs, either, and you’d only have to look to find out. The Garden’s closed. We each had to seal our gates, block them up with stones. And then Michael debriefed us and took the others off back to Heaven.”

“And left you here? By yourself?”

“Someone will be along with new orders by the time my wing’s healed, I’m sure.” Aziraphale tilted his head to listen to a wren buzzing in the next tree over. The pain was, not receding, but transforming into an ache. “There are worse places to wait.”

“Eh, that’s true. Still, leaving you all alone -“

“The better to process events. It’s hard to think with people around, nattering at me.”

“Oh.” Crawly sat up.

“That wasn’t a hint. I don’t particularly want to think about my shortcomings just now.”

Crawly laid down again. “Good. ‘Cause I don’t want to go back to Hell right now, either.”

“Do you ever?”

“No! Dreary place, especially after getting a gander at Earth. All darkness and nasty smells and demons yelling at each other. Once you’ve been up here, all the fresh growing things and the sun - way better than hellfire, or Heaven’s glory for that matter, this sun thing.” He turned his face up to the blueness and the puffy clouds, dusty yellow rays shining straight into his yellow eyes in a way he seemed to relish. “Yeah, the more I skive off up here the better I like it.”

Aziraphale’s hand was numbing more quickly than his wound, so he shifted to hold the ice pack in place with the other. He flexed feeling into his cold fingers, and observed a cluster of small red fruits hovering overhead. Reaching up, he broke them off. “Have you ever had cherries?”

“What?” Crawly turned his face away from its rapt contemplation of the sun. “Is that what those are called? No, never sampled any of the fruit, myself. Not sure it’d do me any good.”

“We’ve got bodies now, remember. They don’t _need_ all the same things human bodies do, but that doesn’t mean they can’t _enjoy_ them.” Aziraphale leaned, and Crawly extended his arm, the reverse of the ice pack operation. He flicked out his forked tongue and rotated one of the little red orbs between two fingers, as Aziraphale picked himself a second cluster. “Eve and Adam would bring me things and I didn’t feel I could refuse. Not that I wanted to, after trying one! These are _lovely_. But they’ve got a little stony thing inside, so what you do is - like this, see?” He popped one into his mouth, chewed off the sweet-tart-warm flesh, and spat the pit out into the bed of bleeding hearts.

Crawly tried to imitate him, but something went wrong with his mouth, and he swallowed the cherry whole instead. Aziraphale had to show him three times before he suddenly said: “Oi! It’s the tongue and the teeth, I get it!” He flicked out the forked tongue, flicked it in again shaped more like a human one, popped in a cherry, flexed his jaws a couple of times, and spat the stone out directly at Aziraphale. It bounced off his knee, leaving a small smudge of cherry juice on the pure white robe. So Aziraphale spat one at Crawly in return, getting him on the elbow, and then somehow they were competing, spitting pits for distance and accuracy. They stripped the lower boughs of cherries, and then Crawly got Aziraphale another ice pack and escalated by also gathering a pile of other pitted fruits, many of them much larger. Rules evolved as shadows lengthened, both scrupulously avoiding the use of miraculous power to cheat, because the fun was in exploring and challenging the properties of fruit pits, humaniform mouths, gravity, and wind resistance.

As evening drew on, though, and the air cooled, Aziraphale found it harder to see, Crawly started folding himself up in his wings, and the game petered out. Aziraphale abruptly remembered that his playmate was a demon and an enemy.

He didn’t want to remember that.

“I wonder what Adam and Eve are doing right now,” he said. “I hope they’re all right. There’s so little to eat, out there.”

“More than you’d think,” said Crawly. “The bare sand desert doesn’t last much past the horizon. And they figured out pretty quickly that they can digest animals.”

“They can? Oh, dear. That must be very unpleasant!”

“Less so if they scorch it a bit with your sword, apparently. So it looks like you did them a real good turn there.”

“How do you know? Have you seen them?”

“From a distance, yeah. I tried to come closer once and Adam tried to stick me like he stuck that lion.”

“Well. Can’t blame him.”

Crawly conceded with a shrug of his wings that ended with him pulling them even tighter around himself. “I was able to watch them for awhile, though. Eve can’t walk far and she’s hungry all the time, so they’ve hunkered down near a spring and surrounded a living space with a bunch of broken thorn bushes to make a kind of mini-wall, keep the more aggressive animals out. They’re experimenting with plants and rocks and animal parts, figuring out how to keep themselves comfortable. And they both talk to Eve’s belly a lot. I heard them laugh.”

Aziraphale didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing, wondering whether the demon was sorry for what he’d done; whether he was putting the best face on the exile and clinging to the sound of laughter as a sop to - no, of course not. Demons didn’t feel remorse. Look at his take on punishment.

Stars bloomed like flowers across the sky. Crawly was nearly invisible in the shadows. Nightbirds and insects sang, and the stars wheeled in a vast complex pattern Aziraphale could not grasp. “I don’t know if you’ve had much chance to observe the stars,” he said, “but I’m finding them a bit intimidating.”

“Oh? Why?”

“They’ve just - there’s so many of them, and they look so tiny, yet it’s my understanding that they’re huge, much bigger than Earth, and ever so far away. They’re all moving according to some system I don’t have a clue about. And not one of them cares if I gave away my flaming sword or not! Even though I _know_ that’s important, it makes no difference to the stars whatever. I can learn their system or not, they won’t care. They’ve got nothing to do with the human project. They’re just out there, on their own, being vast and beautiful.”

Crawly was quiet so long Aziraphale thought he wasn’t going to answer; and when he did, his voice sounded odd. “Can you, can you see the different colors?”

“Some, yes. That thick dense band of them there -“

“The Milky Way.”

“Is that what it’s called? It’s mostly white. Elsewhere I can see some blue - some red - and there’s clouds of - I guess they’re even more distant stars? If I expand my visual range a tad I can get hints of lots of colors there, but even so they tend to slip off my eyes.” And Crawly, in infrared, was invisible, the same color as the chilling air even wrapped in his wings.

“Those’ll be nebulae. Not stars. Gas. Potential stars. Exploded stars. Beautiful things, nebulae. I miss colors.”

“Miss - ?”

“Snake eyes. Blue, white, brown. Most everything else is gray or black.”

“Can’t you, you changed your mouth to eat the cherries. Can’t you change your eyes?”

“Nope. We all got various...attributes during the Fall and there’s a certain baseline we can’t violate. I can remember colors, all right. Can’t see them anymore. Mostly the stars are a big twinkly bunch of blur up there. Mind you, up close and personal, everything’s much clearer than it used to be, especially when its moving. Sharper. I can see near details I never could’ve back when I was working on the stars. Design team’s never going to commend my color sense again, though.”

“You _worked_ on the stars? How lovely!” Of course Crawly would have had work to do when he was an angel. Why not the stars? But it seemed - wrong - for a starmaker to be left crawling on his belly through the dirt. It couldn’t _be_ wrong, because each transformation from angel to demon had been an individually tailored process, but, from Aziraphale’s limited viewpoint, he could only recoil, and try to hide it.

“Quite a few of ‘em, yeah. Nebulae were my favorite, though. Swirling colored gases around the firmament - great fun.”

“So - is there a system? A pattern? Or am I misperceiving?”

“Oh, there’s a system all right. I wasn’t on the design team, but I’d look over the specs and listen to the consultations and such, asked questions on the grounds that I wanted to be able to test things without bothering ‘em, that sort of thing.”

This was a new tone, and Aziraphale wanted to hear more of it, independent of being more curious than he was sure he ought to be. “So? Explain it to me.”

“All right. Well. The first thing you’ve got to understand is, um, it’s what they call a, a _dynamic system_. Means, it’s moving all the time, yeah? And all the parts are moving in all different directions but if you look at it right, in the the the long run, they’re all working _together_, all the movement, you know, it _fits_, and you only have to set it up once, it’ll keep going and moving and changing, that’s the breathtaking part, _all by itself_. We get it all set up, God gives it a push, and off it goes, _wheee_, on its own, and I’m out of a job, but that’s all right, really, because it’s perfect but it’s also _changing_ -“

And Crawly was off and running, words tumbling over and occasionally tangling with each other, but Aziraphale found him riveting anyway. When his desire to convey a technical point exceeded his vocabulary he corralled fireflies to demonstrate the principle, wheeling over his upturned face and directing hands, casting them in an eerily beautiful greenish glow. The solid yellow of his eyes retreated into an amber iris around his slit pupils, leaving an area of clear white sclera which, in combination with the excessive movements of a face which normally had to work hard to convey anything without much help from the eyes, rendered each passing emotion almost painfully open and raw. _If he were to feel anything more personal than intellectual fervor with his eyes like that,_ Aziraphale thought, _it would be an intrusion to look at him._

Crawly had released the fireflies, but was still talking, describing planets, when color started creeping back into the world, heralding the approaching dawn, and Aziraphale felt the vibration of incoming power. He sat bolt upright. “Crawly - an archangel -“

Crawly cut off in mid-sentence, his intent expression transformed to one of dismay. “Shit,” he mouthed, already shifting into snake form, and he dove straight into the ground, leaving a disturbed bare patch behind him which Aziraphale hastily regrew with thyme. He was peacefully examining the wounded wing, damp with the remnants of the most recent ice pack, when the archangel landed in the long early morning shade of the Forbidden Tree.

Aziraphale had never seen her clad in a body before, but the Archangel Raphael was not someone, once encountered, to forget. Her chosen vessel was robed in green, brown hair held back with a green headband, and the wings were the startling shade of the parrots just now waking up and starting the morning scream. She folded them out of the way and surveyed the garden with a critical leaf-colored eye. Aziraphale miracled his robe clean and scrambled to his feet.

“Good morning,” said Raphael. “Hang on, I know you - massive trauma to the femur. Made worse by bracing it against the doorframe to where ever you were defending. Fool move. Much better to seek treatment at once.”

“Yes, sir. So you said at the time. But, in the moment, defending the Hall of Records seemed a little more urgent.”

“Mm, yes, all’s well that ends, I suppose, um -“

“Aziraphale, sir.”

“Right. I see the damage didn’t translate over when you got a body, so that’s good. What’ve you been doing to that wing, though? Come let me have a look at it.”

Aziraphale obeyed, submitting quietly to Raphael’s brusque, but gentle, inspection. “Michael pinioned me with her flaming sword for discipline, sir.”

“Damn stupid thing to do! Still, it’s clean. Yesterday, was it? Yes, progressing properly. How’s it feel? Lot of pain?”

“There was at first. It mostly aches now if I don’t move it. I made ice and packed it.”

“Good thinking, good thinking." She did something with her hand that reduced the ache a bit more. "Though how you’re supposed to get out of here now they’ve sealed the Garden up, I can’t imagine.”

“I expect someone will have to carry me. Have I been reassigned to you, sir?” He could think of worse fates.

“Not that I know of. I was told I’d have assistants coming along soon. But since you’re here, now, you can help me set up.”

“Certainly, sir. What are we setting up?”

“Knock off the sir business. You’ll drive me mad.” Raphael started pulling scrolls and instrument boxes out of the extradimensional space of her voluminous robes. “It’s innovation time again. I’m here to set up a dis-ease laboratory.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dis-ease. Analysis indicates that what went wrong here was, in part, an excess of Ease. Eve and Adam didn’t have enough to do, and it made them susceptible to the Serpent’s wiles. Now that they’re out on their own, instead of thinking of mischief, they’ve started rising to challenges, meeting hardship head-on, and inventing new ways to deal with new problems. It’s going much faster than anticipated. Apparently they’ve already got fire! So, I’ve been told off to invent things to dis-ease them, shake them up before they can get bored. Each with its own cure, of course, something they’ll be able to figure out over time. Though it’s entirely possible they’ll come up with a complete novelty that works, too. Wouldn’t put it past them.”

“So, we - hurt them, and, and tell them to heal themselves?”

Raphael shrugged her wings. “I’m not sure how it’s to be implemented. My job is to design the dis-ease/cure sets. I was thinking plants might be a good vector for curative agents - plenty of them around here to work with, easily transported, familiar. But first I need to design the dis-ease agents and symptoms. Going to be a long job. Meticulous. I’ve got a lot of notes from the Mortal Design documents, and some preliminary drafts, and suchlike, here. Mind organizing them for me? While I take a survey of local resources?”

Aziraphale, who had originally been assigned to developing the Akashic Records, could hardly have been offered a job more suited to his skillset and current physical ability. As he transformed one of Adam’s experiments in carpentry into a library cabinet suitable for notes, reference works, and design drawings, he wondered whether Crawly had lurked nearby to eavesdrop, and what he thought of this dis-ease business if so. The thought made his stomach turn over. Or perhaps that was because he hadn’t worked out the optimum way to deal with ingested food. As soon as Raphael wandered back within earshot, he spoke up. “I, I believe I saw the Serpent lurking about earlier. Should we take precautions against his spying on us?”

“Eh? What?” Raphael looked up from scrutinizing the cherry tree. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Demons are good at destroying, not creating. Probably wouldn’t be able to grasp what we’re doing and even if they do, what’re they going to do about it? No, get those notes organized for me and if any demons are about I expect they’ll soon get bored and drift away.”

Well. No doubt Raphael knew best. (But how _could_ she, when she’d never met Crawly? Never heard him explaining the complex motions of stars and nebulae and illustrating them with fireflies?)

The notes were in terrible disarray, poorly labeled, and much worn around the edges. Aziraphale settled gratefully to the task of rendering these usable, legible, and convenient to locate. Perhaps ultimately he’d be sent back to the Hall of Records, the door to which he’d held against a squad of rebellious angels - not demons yet. He did not want to think about that long, long night, the first night of Heaven’s experience. Nor did he want to think about the prospect of leaving Earth. And his wing still hurt. None of that mattered, right now. He had a useful task to concentrate on, the past could not be changed by any effort of his, and the future could take care of itself for now.

He spent the next few days happily puttering around Eden with Raphael, familiarizing her with the flora and fauna, setting up her lab, and organizing the reams of notes she made. Sometimes he thought he caught a whiff of Crawly, but was never sure enough to mention it and she’d already said she didn’t care, much too involved in her task to accept distractions. She brainstormed out loud freely and listened to his input, such as it was, with due consideration. She decided that infinitesimally small animalcules that would act, at the micro level, as predators in the body, creating various unpleasant side effects at the macro level, would be a good format for dis-ease. Making them too tiny for the humans to see seemed unsporting to Aziraphale, but Raphael said that this would make the specific puzzles suitably hard to solve, while at the same time being fairly easy to deal with in general. “I’m borrowing some of the qualities Hell initiated after the Fall, such as decay and filth,” she explained. “If the humans maintain certain standards of hygiene, they’ll defeat whole classes of dis-eases before they start. The idea is to have both preventative measures _and_ cures available for them to figure out. But perhaps it _would_ also be a good idea to have comparable macro predators, for them to extrapolate from - hmm.”

It was all very interesting, and Aziraphale introduced Raphael to concepts like “taste” and “smell” which enabled her to understand better how humans interacted with the world. They were only beginning to settle into a work routine, though, when Aziraphale felt the approach of another archangel. He pulled himself together enough to snap to attention as Gabriel, flanked by a couple of angels he recognized as having assisted Raphael in the wake of the War, landed on the grassy lek, surrounded by brambles, where the prairie chickens liked to dance. Raphael and Aziraphale had time to approach them as they sang a brief paean, and then Gabriel strode forward and slapped his fellow archangel on the back.

“Morning, Raphael! Finally got those assistants I promised you. How’s it coming?”

“Keep your hands to yourself, Gabe,” said Raphael. “I’m about ready to start designing in earnest. Aziraphale’s been most helpful. Still, it’ll be good to have specialists around again.” She moved to embrace the two newcomers, and they immediately started talking shop in a way that made Aziraphale acutely conscious of how basic she had been forced to make all her conversations with him.

At least he didn’t have long to dwell on it. Gabriel flashed his trademark brilliant grin. “Aziraphale! Glad to hear you’ve been making yourself useful after your little fumble, there. How’s the wing doing? Ready for your new assignment?”

What could he say to that, except, “Yes, please, sir?”

“Glad to hear it!” Gabriel stepped up a little closer than Aziraphale found comfortable, and tapped him confidingly on the shoulder. “Now, all things considered, I can’t get you back into Heaven yet, but there’s been some exciting developments in rolling out Phase 2 of the Earth Project. I’ve been put in charge of Heavenly agents on earth and I can tell you, we’ll all have to be on our toes! Especially once our Adversaries get wind of what She’s doing right now, a real power move.”

Aziraphale did his best to look eager for enlightenment, without revealing his intense desire to take a step backward, and feared he only looked foolish.

“At this very moment,” said Gabriel gleefully, “more humans are being created! All over the Earth!”

“M-more? So there’ll be more, more testing and guarding?”

“Yes, but the testing will be far more extensive. Now that Adam and Eve have determined the parameters, they’ll all start out with a device called a _conscience._ Knowing the difference between good and evil from the get-go. They’ll have hundreds, even thousands, of opportunities to choose. Then, they’ll all be weighed up, and those who didn’t choose goodness _enough_ will go to Hell, while those who _did_ will gain space in a specially designed part of Heaven!”

“So, so Adam and Eve, they can still - they can make up for the one bad choice? That’s, that’s wonderful!”

Gabriel shrugged his wings. “Maybe not Adam and Eve. _They_ had every advantage, and blew it, and now the remaining humans get to start in an earth littered with dangers and difficulties. Nope, can’t imagine letting _them_ off the hook. Not clear to me what the humans will be doing in Heaven, either, but there’s a Great Plan in the works, and I bet it’ll knock all our socks off! Anyway, once Hell finds out and all these new people come online, we expect they’ll be out there trying to repeat the Triumph of Eden, tempting more humans to sin. Which means, we’re going to field angels to thwart those nasty wiles and encourage humans to do good! Thrilling, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir!”

Gabriel beamed at him, much too brightly, at much too close a range. “Now, I understand from Michael, you’ve actually _seen_ their star tempter, the Serpent of Eden?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Excellent! Our presumption is that he’ll be the one in charge of the tempting going forward, so we’ll want a description to prepare our operatives with. What can you tell me about him?”

“Oh, well, ah - “ Aziraphale realized he would have to pick his words carefully. _Knows all about stars and is good at spitting cherry stones_ would be information neither useful, nor easy to explain having. “In, in serpent form he’s about as long as -“ no, hang on, he’d seen more than one size - “I mean, he _can be_ as long as, as from here to that oak, but the second time I saw him in serpent form” _when he’d vanished on Raphael’s arrival_ “he was only about as long as my arm. Both times he was a very handsome black snake with a red underbelly. I believe you should be able to get a good image of him tempting Eve in that shape from the Akashic Records. When he took a more, more angelic form -“

_“Angelic?_”

“Not, not literally, obviously, I suppose its his, his demonic form really, but he did look much like our issued bodies, a winged human, but with eyes like a snake’s - golden eyes - and very dark red hair, black robe, and black wings. Skin much paler than the humans. Angular. When he moved he didn’t, didn’t seem to quite understand how feet and legs work.”

“You seem to have gotten a pretty good look at him.”

“I, well, I suppose I did.”

“Didn’t you want to_ smite_ him?”

“Oh! Oh, but, I would’ve had to leave my post. At the Eastern Gate. And what, what good would it have done? My sword wasn’t,_ isn’t_, strong enough to destroy his essence. And this was, this was after Adam and Eve were driven out. What if this had been a ruse to lure me away from my post to let them back in, and do, whatever? The harm was already done. What good would discorporating him be?”

Gabriel nudged him with his wing, right on the healing pinion, so hard Aziraphale staggered. “Now, see, _that’s_ the kind of thinking we need down here! Michael’s all for smiting on sight and asking questions later, but our agents on earth need to be able to think on their feet. That’s why I _know_ you are going to live down this little setback in no time. To tell you the truth - “ He lowered his booming voice a couple of decibels - “I think Michael overdid your punishment. Not being able to fly? That’s going to limit your usefulness. But you were under her command and it was her call, so what you gonna do, hey? Never mind, I know you’re going to be a _great_ team member, and we’ll have you back up in Heaven in no time. In the meantime, you’ll be answering directly to me, running errands, observing, gathering intelligence, carrying blessings, and especially - thwarting those demonic wiles! It’ll be great!”

“I look forward to it,” said Aziraphale, and honestly, it didn’t sound bad. He liked Earth, and he liked the only two humans he’d met, and if he was to be allowed to actively help them, instead of standing by performing a pointless duty while Crawly talked them into only Crawly knew what - well, that would be satisfying work he could sink his teeth into. If he also got to sink his teeth into a nectarine, or a plum, or something, from time to time, that would be good, too.

“All right, then, let’s get to it!” Gabriel grinned, seized Aziraphale by his wings, and dragged him over the wall on the spot.

In the blackberry bushes, a small black and red snake slithered away.

-30-


End file.
